It's not just education they are destroying... it is society itself

Last updated at 11:17 17 January 2005

This has gone way beyond tragedy or even farce. It has become an institutionalised national fraud, with untold consequences for the nation.

A report published at the weekend revealed that pupils have been awarded a B grade in maths GCSE despite scoring only 17 per cent, while those scoring 45 per cent were awarded an A grade. This risible grading by the OCR exam board follows a similar decision by its rival Edexcel.

Thus candidates who would once have failed are now emerging with top grades. Clearly, such pupils will be unable to cope with the A-level work that these grades may mislead them into tackling.

Yet the Government is forcing schools and universities to produce record increases in higher qualifications. The result is that both A-level and, in turn, degree courses are sharply dumbing down to accommodate ill-equipped students and give them increasingly bogus qualifications.

Actual achievement is being redefined into absurdity. Last week's league tables revealed that schools were being awarded more points for passes in cake decoration or gardening than in maths or science. This is presumably what the Government means when it parrots its oxymoronic cry of 'excellence for all'.

DisintegrationDoctrine

The justification is to make science 'relevant to the 21st century'. This is in accordance with the Government's doctrine of 'personalised learning', which means that everything that is taught must be 'relevant' to the individual child.

This philosophy, of course, destroys the very basis of education, which is all about exposing a child to what he or she does not already know. 'Personalised' or 'relevant' education, by contrast, implicitly means that the child does not progress from the level at which he or she starts.

And the proposals in the Tomlinson report on A-levels, now in Ms Kelly's pending tray, amount to yet a further set of nails in the education coffin.

For by measuring progress rather than attainment, reducing literacy and numeracy to 'functional' maths and English, and diluting A-levels with voluntary work or sporting prowess, they will make a nonsense of examinations themselves.

In short, this is not so much an education policy as a cultural revolution. Knowledge and objectivity have been replaced by subjective opinion and feelings; overcoming obstacles and coping with setbacks or failure have been all but written out of the education script; and our society's moral values are being systematically trashed in our schools.

How on earth has this happened?

Most fundamentally, for the past half-century the education world has been captured by an ideology which seeks to undermine the values and traditions of Western civilisation. Education is all about transmitting knowledge and an understandingof a culture in order to root children in the world around them and to equip them with a set of route maps so that they can successfully make their way in it.

That concept has been replaced by a desire utterly to change this culture, to destroy its values and replace them by a deracinated free-for-all which repudiates all authority. This is what lies behind the 'child-centred' theories which have been abandoning children to ignorance and worse for decades.

Ruthless

The last Tory government, which understood the harm being done, never realised how completely the education system had been undermined. So all the Tories' efforts to repair the damage were subverted from within.

This was then compounded by Labour's obsession with 'equality' and its ruthless pursuit of the appearance of improvement, leading to our rampant grade inflation, ever more desperate lowering of standards and intimidation of our last remaining bastions of excellence in the universities to become factory farms of mediocrity.

As a result, progress in Britain has been put into reverse. Exam papers taken by 11-year- olds applying for places to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1898 - asking candidates how characters such as Harold Hardrada, Saladin, or Frederick the Elector Palatine were connected with English history, or to analyse the grammatical structure of selected words and phrases - couldn't be tackled by most of today's A-level students, let alone our primary school-leavers.

One of the lessons of history is that the excesses of one century are often repaired by the next. But to do that, a society needs to be able to think and thus to understand what has gone wrong. The terrifying thing about our education meltdown is that we are destroying the means by which our society can repair itself.

For if our country is not educated, our culture, economy and society simply cannot survive.

Our education system was once the envy of the world. But now it has become not only the motor of the 'me' society but, even more alarmingly, the instrument of cultural and social suicide.